Cold Fusion

Reluctant to Allow Patent Applications for Cold Fusion

 

Cold Fusion & Patent Office
by Hal Fox
President, Fusion Information Center
halfox@slkc.uswest.net

August 6, 1999

INVESTIGATION OF PATENT OFFICE

Special Agent Kimberlee Taylor
Office of the Inspector General
Commerce Department
Room 7614
14th and Constitution, NW
Washington, DC 20230
Phone 202-482-0909
Fax 202-501-0710

Due to complaints about the reluctance of the Office of Patents and Trademarks to allow any patent applications for cold fusion, or low-energy nuclear reactions to be processed beyond being rejected, an investigation has been ordered.

Special Agent Kimberlee Taylor has been asked to get information about the complaints against the actions of the Office of Patents and Trademarks and report back to her supervisor. Dr. Mitchell Swartz has sent 35 pounds of papers, books, and 3 videos to Ms. Taylor. Hal Fox has written a four- page summary of the events that have attempted to dismiss cold fusion as bad science.

It is believed that this investigation has been caused by citizens writing to their elected officials (Senators and Members of Congress). It is further strongly suggested that the best possible help for the support of this investigation will be a considerable expression of concern from our Senators and Members of Congress.

PLEASE WRITE THE MEMBER OF CONGRESS FROM YOUR DISTRICT AND BOTH SENATORS FROM YOUR STATE. Send a copy to Ms. Kimberlee Taylor.

A brief summary of the history of the attempts to stop the development of cold fusion is posted at ????? [ check http://www.padrak.com/ine ] (Dr. Bailey put in a hot button or something and post the attachment)

Please help this important investigation by sharing this message with everyone you can, especially via the internet. Here are salient features:

The United States is the only nation to deny inventors the right to patent cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions inventions. Why?

Of over 3,000 technical papers on cold fusion (many theory and review papers) over 600 papers from over 200 scientific laboratories from precisely 30 countries have reported success in replicating or extending the original discovery of Professors Pons and Fleischmann.

Over 100 cold fusion (new-hydrogen energy) patents have issued in Japan.

Seven international conferences have been held on cold fusion with an estimated 200 or more scientists attending each conference. Is it conceivable that all of this time and effort by world-class scientists would be spent on a scientific fraud?

Two groups offer kits for sale with MONEY-BACK GUARANTEES of success. Professor John Dash is preparing to sell cold fusion kits to high schools. His summer classes for entering science students and interested high-school students have had successful cold fusion experiments every summer for several years.

The person in the Office of Patents and Trademarks who is the supervisor of the activity to handle the class of inventions that include cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions is Harvey Bhrendt. He is reported to state that cold fusion is not real because there are no commercial products on the market. Perhaps he hasn't heard about the products that are being offered for sale with a money-back guarantee. Perhaps he realizes that it is very difficult to commercial a product without patent protection.

The big issue is the denial to U.S. inventors of their constitutional rights to the protection of their inventions!

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Here is the background information faxed to Special Agent Taylor:

Dear Ms. Kimberlee Taylor,

We have been informed that you are interested in information regarding cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions and the policy of the Office of Patents and Trademarks with respect to patent applications. The following information may be of some interest:

A. BACKGROUND

As the director of the first research laboratory at the University of Utah Research Park, I was intensely interested in the March 23, 1989 announcement of cold fusion called by the University of Utah administration (not called by Pons and Fleischmann). The announcement of a new source of energy was most exciting to me. That day I began the plans for trying to be of some help (systems engineering background, missile system specialist for several years). By mid April 1989 we had organized the Fusion Information Center and obtained offices at the University of Utah Research Park.

By July 1989, we had decided that information gathering and publishing such information would be our best role. Our first edition of Fusion Facts was published in July 1989 and continued as a monthly publication for several years before being incorporated as a part of the Journal of New Energy, a peer-reviewed, quarterly, scientific journal (abstracted from the first issue by Chemical Abstracts -- the world's foremost scientific abstracting organization).

B. THE ATTACKS ON COLD FUSION

By the fall of 1989 it was apparent that someone had organized and was carrying out a campaign against the new technology of cold fusion. Here are the facts, insofar, as we have been able to gather and publish the facts. Please note that all of this was done in secrecy (except for the ERAB sub committee).

A subcommittee of the Energy Research Advisory Board traveled to various laboratories where successes in cold fusion had been claimed. If the research was measuring neutrons, they were told that it was background radiation. If the researcher was getting tritium, they were told that it was contamination. If excess heat was being produced, they were told that they didn't have proper calorimetry. Except for one small paragraph in the ERAB final report, demanded by one of the honest members of the committee, the report was entirely negative about cold fusion.

An arrangement was made for someone in the Office of Patents (any type of coercion or reward is unknown) to ensure that no cold fusion patent application was accepted for patenting. Each person, as far as we have been able to determine, was sent the same information: a copy of a newspaper article from the New York Times saying that cold fusion doesn't work; a copy of the paper by 16 Ph.D.s from MIT stating that they could not replicate cold fusion (this is the paper where the authors removed the data showing that they did get a small amount of excess heat).

A person (representing powers-that-be in Washington, D.C.) called many of the physics and chemistry departments at major universities in the United States. Here was his message as relayed to me from one such department: "If you have so much as a graduate student working on cold fusion, you will get no contracts out of Washington."

All editors of the major scientific journals were contacted and were instructed not to publish articles on cold fusion. All editors but one then set up barriers against cold fusion publications. The one editor who did not accept that type of instruction was Professor George Miley, editor until this year of Fusion Technology, the international journal of the American Nuclear Society.

An amount of $30,000 (or $40,000 - different sources) was given to Random House to have a "hatchet job" done against cold fusion. The result was the widely acclaimed (by orchestration) book by Gary Taubes, BAD SCIENCE, THE SHORT LIFE AND WEIRD TIMES OF COLD FUSION, c1993. For one knowledgeable about the cold fusion developments, it is obvious that this book was a deliberate hatchet job.

In addition to the above well-orchestrated activities, some appointed, or self-appointed scientists have been very active in traveling to conventions, etc. and doing their best to challenge any positive cold fusion results. Two of these are (were) Dr. Douglas R.O. Morrison (CERN, Switzerland) and Professor John R. Huizenga of University of Rochester (chairman of the ERAB sub committee, if my memory is correct).

One of the most active protagonists has been Robert Parks, with some association with the American Physical Society. (The current president of the American Physical Society, in a recent conversation, denies that Robert Parks speaks for the society.) Parks was instrumental in preventing a recent conference from being held in a proffered auditorium in a government facility. Parks has an email list of many people in the DOE and about once a month or more often sends out statements that ridicule any cold fusion or low-energy nuclear reaction experiments, papers, books, etc.

Please recognize that this anti-cold-fusion program was a very-well, planned and orchestrated scheme to destroy cold fusion. These were clever and well-done operations. We have been told that were it not for Fusion Facts and its rapid exchange of information of successes in various parts of the world, cold fusion would have been dead. That is more credit than we deserve.

C. THE COLLECTION OF PROFESSIONAL PAPERS

The Fusion Information Center, Inc. is believed to have accumulated the world's largest collection of papers on cold nuclear fusion, new-hydrogen energy (the Japanese label), low-energy nuclear reactions, and other enhanced energy papers. We have collected and reviewed over 3,000 papers on cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions, read the papers, written reviews, and published the reviews. Over 600 papers from over 200 laboratories in 30 countries report some successes in replicating or extending the original work of Pons and Fleischmann. Dr. Mitchell Swartz and I have presented papers on this extensive review of the literature.

In addition, this office has published New Energy News, for the past six years. All members of the Institute of New Energy receive this newsletter. In addition, beginning in January 1996, this office began publishing the Journal of New Energy, a quarterly, peer-reviewed, scientific journal. The reason was the lack of professional journals that would publish some of the new-energy and new-science papers. For example, we have published six papers about torsion field fluctuations which report on formerly highly-secret work done by over 25 laboratories in the former USSR. This journal has published two issues providing the proceedings of two International Conferences on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions.

All of this published information (Fusion Facts, New Energy News, & Journal of New Energy), covering a ten-year period, has now been published on a CD-ROM. If a copy of this CD-ROM would be of interest to you, we would be pleased to send you a copy.

D. THE ROLE OF THE DOE

As is well-known, political appointees to government agencies come and go but the real work of the agency is accomplished by the network of civil servants who bear the burden of continuing and exercising the Congressional mandates for their offices.

Here is a summary of the current situation in DOE:

The DOE is required by law to handle the disposition of all high-level nuclear wastes including weapons-related liquid wastes (such as at the Hanford Site, Washington state) and the spent-fuel pellets from nuclear power plants and from nuclear submarines. In about 1993 or 1994 a contact was given to the National Research Council to prepare a study on the best methods for separation and/or transmutation of nuclear wastes. The result was the following large publication printed and distributed in 1996: Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separations and Transmutation, Committee on Separations Technology and Transmutation Systems, Board on Radioactive Waste Management, Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources, National Research Council, published by National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. c1996 by the National Academy of Sciences.

It is not known if the contract was awarded with counsel and advice on the expected outcome. However, the end result was a statement to the effect that there is no known method of handling radioactive wastes that is more cost-effective than geologic storage. That has been and still is the major objective of the DOE - geologic storage. Any proposals that claim to have new technology that will stabilize high-level radioactive wastes are rejected. In one DOE document asking for proposals, it was explicitly stated that no cold fusion proposals would be accepted.

Several laboratories, included our own, have demonstrated that there is technology that appears to be effective in transmuting radioactive wastes. None of this work, to our knowledge, is government funded. Apparently, the network of those opposing cold fusion and other low-energy nuclear reactions is most effective throughout the DOE as well as in the appropriate division of the Office of Patents. It is believed that this opposition group is mainly related to the hot-fusion community of scholars and lobbyists and that the activities are being largely supported by federal funds provided to the hot fusion community.

/s/ Hal Fox

President, Fusion Information Center

For more info also see http://www.infinite-energy.com

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